The purpose of applying for the physician scientist award is to help me acquire the skills necessary to carry on clinically oriented research. The program will be divided into two phases; phase I will be a learning phase where both laboratory and a knowledge base will be acquired, while phase II will be devoted to a specific research project. During phase I, I will attend advanced immunology courses along with other advanced courses in biology. I will also attend seminars of interest both in the Immunogiology Research Center (IRC) and in other departments of the University of Minnesota. In addition, attendance and participation in the IRC's Journal Club will occur twice a week. My research will be in areas already being explored by this latoratory. These will include immunogenetics of HLA, cellular immunology and recombinant DNA technology. I shall spend some time being exposed to basic techniques of protein chemistry. During the second phase of my training, a specific research project will be undertaken. I will attempt to understand the associations between HLA and insulin dependent diabetes. In this disease, both positive associations (DR4, Dw4, DR3, Dw3) and negative associations (DR2 and Dw2) have been found. Using the techniques mastered during phase I, I will study this relationship using two approaches, (i) phenotypic studies with cloned primed lymphocyte typing (PLT) reagents, of cells that have already been extensively characterized vis-a-vis serologic definition of HLA-A,B,C,DR and DQ as well as with HTCs to characterize Dw, and (ii) DNA technology, specifically restriction digests, Southern blots, making of c-DNA libraries and DNA sequencing of interesting fragments of c-DNA clones.